The Financial Communication Society returned to Philadelphia with a presentation and panel discussion on “How Financial Marketers Get Content Right”. The event on April 2 was not only held in a historic and apropos venue, The Philadelphia Inquirer, but attended by financial marketers from Chicago to New York.

the types of content being consumed continue to change and expand and require more resources to deliver

the importance of a comprehensive program brief that include goals, benefits and metrics that span the buyer’s journey from brand awareness to marketing qualified leads to closed transactions and retention

best practices for driving home corporate messaging in the context of local markets

This survey by MIT and Deloitte finds that leaders who are enabling today’s marketing organizations do the following:

Provide vision and purpose

Create conditions to experiment

Empower people to think differently

Get people to collaborate across boundaries

But today’s marketing organizations are still organized for yesterday’s marketing practices with a separate silo for the digital team! Growth programs are designed and optimized for silos rather than for optimizing an omni channel customer experience.

We are helping CMOs think differently about an organization structure that is agile, learns, empowers, and collaborates to deliver seamless CX across any and all channels.

Marianne Hewitt, Founder and Principal Consultant of The Growth Strategy Group and board member of the Chicago Chapter of the American Marketing Association (CAMA) responsible for Analytics and the MarTech SIG, moderated a panel at CAMA’s annual MarketingTech Smart Conference to summarize the day’s learnings.

Takeaways from the panel discussion:

Keep the MarTech stack simple (KISS). While there are over 5,000 vendor products/solutions to choose from, there are only 6-8 core solutions needed to market (aka grow revenue) successfully.

This is not necessarily a bold or new move but consistent with the trend of the CMO being responsible for the end-to-end CX. A survey conducted two years ago by The Growth Strategy group and BMA Chicago, Minnesota and Wisconsin spoke to this evolution.

The tweak is that an additional layer (CXO) is being added organizationally to get marketing and CX under one umbrella.

Here in Las Vegas, Oracle’s Modern Customer Experience is underway. Last night, Chicago did well in the Markies with Morningstar (Best Lead Management program) and Avon (Best Overall Customer Experience) receiving honors.

Those of you attending Marketo’s Summit in San Francisco, the speaker lineup is pretty awesome. If you can’t attend, register free for the keynotes which are being live streamed. Steve Lucas’ keynote was visionary, inspiring and energizing.

Last, but not least, Kellstadt Marketing Group’s 9th Annual Symposium TellAStory will be held on Saturday, April 29. Register.

Key themes in all 3: CX including customer journey mapping and storytelling. The Engagement Economy. And, of course, ABM.

Chicago AMA launched its new MarTech SIG (Special Interest Group) Thursday evening, April 6, 2017 at TangoCode in the West loop.

The theme of the session was “Understanding end-to-end Marketing Technology Enablement”, the first of four MarTech SIGS to be conducted this year.

The group of over 20 attendees was led by Marianne Hewitt, Growth Strategist and Marketing Technologist with The Growth Strategy Group. Marketers’ budgets and priorities for 2017 were presented, MarTech was defined and its scope was discussed and, most importantly, the group was surveyed for preferred topics in the 3 remaining SIGS in 2017.

Attendees overwhelmingly selected

Customer Experience

Analytics

Content Marketing and

Marketing Technologies

as the highest priority topics of interest for future meetings.

The date for the next SIG will be announced shortly and will be held during May or June.

Chicago AMA introduced Charley Orwig as Director of SIGs at this event.